Symposium honours Lee Teng's career in accelerator physics
A symposium and banquet, organized by the Argonne National Laboratory and Fermilab, was held on 24 February to celebrate the retirement of accelerator physicist Lee Teng. Since his first job with accelerators as a graduate student in 1949, where he developed a beam extraction system in the Chicago cyclotron for Enrico Fermi and others, Teng has been active on some of the most important problems in accelerator physics. The extraction system, worked out with James Tuck, was later used at Liverpool University and then at Chicago University, and was the basis for resonant extraction used almost everywhere.
Teng later became the principal designer of the Argonne Zero Gradient Synchrotron and then director of the Argonne Particle Accelerator Division. When the National Accelerator Laboratory (later the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, FNAL) was formed, he was there on "day one" in 1967 and became head of accelerator theory. He was busy with a variety of activities at FNAL, such as the design of components and colliders including the Tevatron, and he also was able to find time to contribute to projects at CERN, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, Brookhaven National Laboratory and TRIUMF in Canada.
Teng helped design the proton therapy facility at the Loma Linda University Medical Center, California, and the Taiwan Light Source, located at Taiwan's National Synchrotron Radiation Research Center, where he served as its first director. He returned to Argonne in 1989 to help design the 7 GeV light source, and later served as head of the Accelerator Physics group of the Advanced Photon Source.
At the symposium, Teng and others noted the many responsibilities he still has as a member of various boards and committees. It will be an active retirement.